The second hearing was today. We had gotten very prepared. Eun Jeong even talked heavily with attorneys and negotiators. One of the negotiators said he wanted to meet me and hang out some time. Anyway, they helped back up everything I had been saying all along. My case is simple. We need to keep it simple.
K.I.S.S. (and I don’t mean the band)
Unnamed Crazy Woman, we knew, was going to do her usual smoke and mirrors routine to distract the inspector from the real issues.
I had been coming down with a cold and was already tired from starting summer school classes on top of my regular classes (voluntarily). Yeong-jun had promised to help translate this time. Maria was heading to Australia, so we decided if we were going to change translators, we’d better do it now. This will take a long time.
We met Yeong-jun and a friend of his, a businessman working in the steel pipes business, at the Labor Office. Eun Jeong had prepared a three-page statement summarizing all we were claiming with exact figures in Korean. She brought it in to the inspector while we waited outside.
After a while, the inspector joined us outside to talk while he had a smoke. I was doing a lot more talking this time, and Yeong-jun was translating very quickly. Unnamed Crazy Woman was again running late. When she arrived, I casually took out my MP3 player and set it to record.
The inspector held most of the hearing outside. It was hilarious. Unnamed Crazy Woman was supposed to show up with all the bills to justify taking all that money out of my account. She showed up with a little yellow piece of paper with some scribbles on it inside a clear binder.
That was all she had.
The inspector was getting annoyed with her. The whole conversation boiled down to why she was taking money out of my account and not showing me the bills. She came up with new excuses each time, mostly saying that she called and called the utility companies, but they wouldn’t send her copies of the bills.
I pointed out that any of us can and have called utility companies and have gotten copies of bills within the same week. “It’s taking you six months.”
She then went on and said that my utilities were turned off because I was late paying the bills.
“How can I have been paying the bills late when you’ve been taking money out of my paycheck [to pay them]?”
During most of this, the inspector stood there, shaking his head at Unnamed Crazy Woman. When she started getting hysterical (3:30 into the audio file), he started laughing.
After a point, the inspector brought us inside to speak to Eun Jeong, Yeong-jun, and me privately. We plainly restated our case. We used clear logic, and the inspector was a lot more responsive. But he was frustrated. His workload was heavy, and his week-long vacation was coming up in two weeks. As a result, he decided to push back the date when the case would be decided. Unnamed Crazy Woman was making more and more strange claims, like saying that I owed her money because she paid me money to be manager, and she had decided (after she had paid me and I had finished my year) that I was a bad manager. She wanted her money back.
We have another hearing on August 4th. This will likely go before a judge. I hope it does.
Yeong-jun’s poor friend was stuck outside next to Unnamed Crazy Woman. He said that Unnamed Crazy Woman was going on and on about how I am a “famous liar.” That’s funny because even my ex-wife would say that lying was one thing I was incapable of. He said that he knew her type, and she was a professional liar. Being a businessman who had been through cases like this before, he reinforced my view that we have a simply solid case. We don’t have to prove much. Unnamed Crazy Woman has to do the proving. And if she still can’t come up with the bills, it’s obvious to anyone that she’s lying about the bills and everything else on top of that. So anyway, I’m posting a link to the audio file I recorded today of the hearing. It’s a little over 16 minutes. Most of it is in Korean. You can hear Unnamed Crazy Woman raving at 150 miles per hour while Young-jun tries to make sense of what she’s saying to translate to me. Even if you can’t understand the Korean, it’s entertaining to listen to. Around 10 minutes into it was when she started going into logistical circles about me paying bills late when it was she who had the bills and the money stolen from my paychecks to pay them.
